K12 Education Technology Discussion with Jim Heynderickx

It’s been an interesting week with electrical ugrade work being done in the building. When you need to plan to have the core circuits down to your server room for a day or two, it takes a bit of thought of how to safely keep some of your services up (firewall, Internet, Domain Controllers, Email) and accept the fact that other services will need to be down.

Part of the challenge is air conditioning. A fair chunk of the electricity used in our server room is the chiller units, so with them down only a fraction of the racks can be up.

Something that worked to our advantage, however, was the UPS units. After shutting down nearly all of the servers, we were safely able to switch the core and basic services to an alternative power supply simply by plugging the UPS units (failing over to their batteries) and then plugging in to the alternative power. They have done very well with this.

Anyway, today we should be able to get back to normal, and if there aren’t snags, I might even be able to start something of the remainder of this spring break.